Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Heat Kills: A Gardening Ramble

These poor phlox keep trying. They looked so good just a few days ago.

My garden is suffering under the sun’s merciless onslaught. The John Fannick phlox have withered, as would most of the other plants if I failed to give them their daily watering, and the lobelias are gone.

Mr. Stripy is still barren as is the newcomer. Shaking the plants and threatening them doesn’t do any good. I am beginning to think that the pollinators prefer the other flowers to the tomatoes. In a couple of weeks, I will pull up Mr. Stripy and plant a rank of fall tomatoes from a real nursery.

Even the sunflowers that Beccano insisted we plant (I grew up thinking of them as weeds—sorry, any Kansans who stumble on this post.) are wilting in the unrelenting solar oven we call a climate.

The remnants of the last tropical storm to hit the Texas coast brought us ¾” of rain. It took less than two days for that relief to become only a vague memory. The storm that hit yesterday brought us almost nothing. It did keep the temperatures down to the upper 90s for a couple of days, so I’m not complaining.

One star is the Jacobi, which is flowering again.


11 August Update: Added phlox photo taken at the time but not uploaded.

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